Advising Notes FAQ
Following are the answers to most frequently asked questions about Advising Notes, which are not student-facing.
Privacy
Advising note sharing and privacy settings drive what SSUs each institution needs. Outside of FERPA requests, students never see the contents of advising notes about them.
What about FERPA?
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is a federal law that protects the privacy of student education records. Advising Notes capture critical student information and let you share it with other support system members using a FERPA-compliant sharing system.
Important: Be always aware that FERPA grants students the right to inspect and review all records, including these Advising notes. For questions, contact privacy@civitaslearning.com.
Do Directors see private notes?
Not unless the advisor leaves the position and ownership of their content is transferred to someone else, such as a director. Similarly, the author is the only one who can ever edit those notes.
Can private notes be deleted?
Advisors can delete their own notes. Although the deleted note is gone from the UI, the database keeps a record of the note, flagged as deleted. For security, advisors cannot delete any notes they do not own, and they cannot delete notes from the database.
Creating Notes
Where can I add notes?
There are four places where you can enter notes about a student:
What info goes where?
There are several areas to capture information at different times, to keep the situation clear:
| What it is | How it’s used | |
|---|---|---|
| Session Note (visible to student) | During appointment scheduling, this is shared information added by the student or the advisor | The advisor adds “Please bring your updated resume to review”, which is included in the email to the student.The student adds “My anxiety is bad – I may need to drop a course.” |
| Intake Note | Staff-only information added during scheduling, to help with the appointment | The admin assistant is creating appointments on behalf of advisors and gives context for the advisor.The advisor uses this for “notes to self” while preparing for the appointment. |
| Comment | Staff-only information added as follow- up | The advisor returns to the appointment notes to confirm that the student decided to take a medical leave.The advisor returns to record that the student hopes to attend Summer term, to plan for that outreach. |
Can I have a default signature?
Yes, you can have a default signature, which you set up in your personal Settings (gear) page. Scroll down to Signatures.
Can’t I use hyphens in my note title?
The subject of the Advising Note must be plain text, numbers and letters only. Do not include punctuation or special characters (such as @ # $ % & * | ^).
Should I share notes?
Yes, except where privacy concerns indicate caution, such as health and financial information. When it’s safe to share, the information can contribute context and enable timely service outreach to the student. Most institutions have notes shared by default, such as with the Advising SSU. You can add other SSUs, groups, and individual staff members.
Best practice: If there is urgency involved, check the Notify People box.
Do my messages become Advising Notes?
Yes, when you send a message to an individual student, including any attachments you may have added. When you do bulk communication, however, advising notes are not generated, currently.
Managing Notes
How do I track what to follow up on?
One of the easiest ways to manage your follow-up tasks is to enable the star ( ⭐ ) next to any of your advising notes that you will need to circle back to. You can spot the stars in the My Advising Notes list, or you can search for them specifically in the Advanced Search (scroll to the bottom):
What are the red alerts on notes?
Those flag notes that are missing text entries, so they are incomplete. You can find them all by doing an Advanced Search and filtering for Note Status: Incomplete:
Reporting
How do I get reports on these notes?
On the Reports page, you can choose to create an Advising Notes Custom Report. These reports have the full set of demographic columns and filtering available, which allow you to design very specific reports on notes, based on when they were created or updated. You can save your designed reports as templates.
How do I share my report?
If it’s the report setup that you want to share, choose Save Template. Pick a name that explains it well, general to specific: Notes for Seniors on Career Exploration. If you want to share report output (the snapshot in time), select the Download button and distribute the spreadsheet (XLSX) file itself.
Are reports different from Advanced Search downloads?
Only in the additional demographic criteria that you can apply and in being able to save report templates. Wherever you are viewing advising notes (on a student’s Notes tab or on the Advising Notes page), you will always see a Download button above the table.
Downloading outputs a spreadsheet (XLSX) with all the viewable notes, including all these columns:
| FIRST NAME | SUBJECT | SESSION NOTE | INTERACTION TYPE |
| LAST NAME | ADVISING NOTE | INTAKE NOTE | APPT. TYPE |
| STUDENT ID | AUTHOR | DATE CREATED | APPT. MODALITY |
| APPT. DATE | DATE UPDATED | SESSION TOPICS |
For targeted reporting, first do an Advanced Search on the notes. Filter down to just the information you need, such as a date range, type, advisor, or topic. If you need demographics, use the Reports page.
Tip: The Downloads button (next to Advanced Search) stores these files that you generate (meaning the data is captured at the time it was run). Delete the ones you don’t need, but keep snapshots for handy comparison.
Notifications
How does my team learn about new notes?
If your institution configured a default set of shared users for Advising notes, that default group can see every note you create that isn’t set to Private. However, by default they do not get bell notifications for each note, as that could be hundreds to go through and be unmanageable.
Can we enable notifications?
Yes, but there is a better way. Although default groups can be configured to get notifications for all advising notes, the best practice is to make notifications intentional: when you add Share with others options, you choose whether to check Notify People before selecting Share.
Why don’t I get a bell for notes shared with me?
You (and each other Advising user) can control your notifications as you prefer. On the Settings (gear) page, scroll to Communication Settings and see if you have disabled notification for Advising Note Share. If it’s enabled, the other advisor may not have selected Notify People.
